Getting Ready to Throw Down

A vast, boundless primeval forest stood there, and layers of branches and leaves blocked out the sunlight, exuding a primitive and desolate aura from afar.

This place was the testing ground for the second exam of the Joint Chunin Exams—Forest of Death.

Yesterday's exam was the same as the written exam in the original work when Naruto's generation took it, which was actually an assessment of a ninja's intelligence-gathering ability.

Out of the initial eighty participating squads, a full twenty teams were eliminated. A portion of them truly lacked the required skill, but more had their team members suffer a mental breakdown; once a single person exposed a flaw, it directly implicated the entire team and got them disqualified.

You really have to hand it to Jiraiya; despite looking all unserious, he was actually quite adept at pulling off these kinds of mind games.

As the morning sun rose once again, all the examinees who had successfully passed the written exam had already gathered at the outer perimeter of Forest of Death.

Unlike the routine exams of previous sessions, following discussions among the high-ranking officials of various nations, this team battle would be completely deregulated, and the team leaders of each village had long since conveyed the high-level resolutions word for word to every single Genin.

At this moment, at the entrance of the forest, the gap in mental state under these brutal rules was also infinitely magnified.

The squads from the Five Great Nations had long since received tactical deployments from their higher-ups, either possessing clear action routes, gathering strategies, and concentrated fire targets, or boasting formidable personal strength and feeling fully confident about the upcoming battles.

Therefore, even knowing that the forest was fraught with danger, most of them maintained calm expressions, with only a few feeling somewhat